


Sleepless

by hops



Series: Our Endless Numbered Days [4]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Episode 66, F/M, sadness!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-08 20:47:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12261798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: “It was lonely. I-- In the dream, I disappeared. I went away for a long, long time, and you couldn’t find me. You forgot me. And I missed you.”“I love you. I could never forget you.”Lucretia has a sleepless night on the eve of a necessary betrayal.





	Sleepless

She hasn’t slept a wink. 

She knows what’s coming tomorrow. Not in the morning, but by the afternoon, once they’ve all come back home.  _ Home.  _ What’s home anymore? The surface below? Their broken, plane-worn ship? Each other? 

Magnus snores beside her. She swallows tears. 

She dwells on the journals again, thinking, thinking, what if she’d made a mistake? What if she’d missed a crucial detail, or smothered something irreplaceable with a stroke of black ink? She considers the irony of it all, of how the Hunger, in all of its terrifying inky blackness, aimed to devour everything good in the world. In every world. Was she not doing the same? 

She tosses next to him, unable to find a position she can feel comfortable in. Or perhaps she doesn’t want to sleep. She doesn’t want to miss a second of her last night at his side. It will be a long year apart: lonely, arduous, familiar. They had done it once before. The relics would be difficult to find, but nothing could compare to the terror, the isolation of the year spent pursued by the Judges and the horrors that had inhabited their plane. 

She cries. She can’t help it. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t, but how could she not? 

She studies the lines of his face, vision blurred and burned by tears.  _ Magnus.  _ Her first friend of the seven. She’d fallen so quickly and so  _ hard,  _ harder than she’d ever thought possible. Her opposite in every way: loud, goofy, impulsive, brave. He’d taught her what it meant to protect. He’d taught her what it meant to love ferociously, wholeheartedly, and relentlessly. How could she repay him for that? 

How could she  _ betray _ him like this? 

She ghosts two fingers beneath the eye that’d she’d seen blackened a hundred times before. This is the first year that she hasn’t. They’re finally getting older. He doesn’t look any different now, and neither does she. But what they’ve done has been carving them away, like the flow of water eroding a canyon out of stone. The chasm of her heart runs deep; she fears the day she’ll fall into it entirely, helpless to climb back out. She wants desperately to save her family from the same fate. Her heart twists in her chest, wondering,  _ what has become of us?  _ And then, after tearful pause,  _ what  _ will  _ become of us?  _

She thumbs his cheekbone and he stirs, prompting the swift withdrawal of her hand. She shuts her eyes in false serenity and prays he doesn’t wake. 

He murmurs something about the beach. The tears that pour from her immediately are unstoppable. Her sob is what stirs him from his rest. 

“Luce?” he sighs, voice thick with sleep. But there’s something more, a grief that’s smoldered as embers since the first glassing, since the Relic Wars began, since Lup disappeared. The kind of exhaustion sleep won’t fix. She hopes, silently, that once the memories are gone, he’ll be able to snore through the night like he used to. She wonders how she’ll sleep without the sound. 

A reminder tugged at her heart. She made it a year without them once before. She could do it again this time. 

“Go back to sleep,” she coaxes as a whisper. “I’m here.” She knows she won’t be tomorrow. At least she won’t have to see him forget her. She’ll avoid the worst, then take him home to Raven’s Roost. There will be so much for him there: a town, a house, a studio. She’ll miss the little piles of wood peelings on her desk. The songs he’d hum as he carved. The little long-healed knicks in his hands. Another sob escapes her. She curses herself for it. 

His eyes blink wide awake to meet her, finding her dissolving into tears. “What’s wrong?” he frowns, reaching for her face. She tries to turn, but the effort is halfhearted at best. She melts into the warm touch of his hand. “Lucy, talk to me.” 

She shakes her head and purses her lips, blinking out more tears. It’s settling in now, the weight of what she’ll do. The knife she will slide, painfully slow and debilitating, into his back. The words that she’ll feed, one by one, to the Voidfish they’d raised together. He’d long outgrown his tank. They’d long outgrown their welcome in this world.  _ Maybe next time,  _ she hopes. 

“I just… had a bad dream,” she whispers, shaking her head. 

He moves close and kisses her softly. “Tell me what happened.” 

“I… I had a dream about the Judges. About Lup. I don’t know. It was all very strange.” Fabricating a story, lying to him, it wasn’t what she was used to. All of this secrecy and deception and the hours spent locked away in her room, barring even Magnus from entering, it wasn’t her. It wasn’t  _ fair.  _

“Sounds scary.” He tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. 

She sobs again, and laments her broken heart. “It was lonely. I-- In the dream, I disappeared. I went away for a long, long time, and you couldn’t find me. You forgot me. And I missed you.” 

“I love you. I could never forget you.” 

She bawls. He kisses her again, catching tears as fast as they’re falling. Who will catch them once he’s gone? 

She kisses back fervently, tearfully, breathing his breath with her open mouth against his. She can’t stop, so she doesn’t. She kisses until it hurts. 

He doesn’t ask why. He hasn’t asked why in a long time. Everything hurts these days. 

They make love in the dark by the light of Fisher’s tank, fumbling and urgent and sad. 

When he comes back to bed and wraps around her, he sleeps soundly. Slowly, her tears recede, until there’s nothing left but emptiness. She doesn’t sleep. 


End file.
